When anti-drugs activist Yevgeny Roizman won the mayoral race in Russia's fourth-largest city of Yekaterinburg on Sunday, it was hailed as the opposition's biggest electoral victory against Vladimir Putin and the ruling United Russia party.
Roizman is many things: off-road racing champion, published poet, icon collector, jewellery maker, community leader and former state Duma deputy. But "opposition" is one thing he's not, he has repeatedly said in interviews.
Opposition is "those who strive for power, those who want to overthrow the regime. I just want to live in a normal country," Roizman told the Guardian. "If there is some sort of regime, let others participate in it. I'm ready to work with any regime as long as those in power aren't cannibals.
"I'm just a different person ... I have [my] own opinion and know how to express it, I know how to stick to it," he added. "Namely for this reason I never joined United Russia."
Yet in many ways, Roizman is still an opposition figure and a political maverick, however reluctant. Without the access to state television enjoyed by his main opponent, he overcame a smear campaign to defeat the candidate from United Russia, which despite its plummeting approval ratings dominated most of the mayoral, gubernatorial and regional legislative elections held last weekend. He conducted a campaign based largely on rhetoric against the Kremlin-appointed regional governor and his team of "newcomers".
Roizman's victory seemed to confirm the existence of a new Kremlin policy allowing opposition candidates to run in local and regional races. Many of Sunday's elections were more competitive and lacked the large-scale ballot-stuffing of previous elections, but they were not entirely fair, since United Russia candidates including Roizman's opponent, vice-governor Yakov Silin, continued to abuse public resources in their campaigns.
In his first remarks after the vote, Roizman questioned Yekaterinburg's bid to host the 2020 World Expo and the four World Cup matches planned there in 2018, both of which are high-profile projects backed by the Kremlin.
Although Roizman was a state Duma deputy from 2003 to 2007, he has remained independent of the regime's power vertical, according to analyst Alexander Ivakhnik of the Centre of Political Technologies.
"He engaged with the authorities not as someone subordinate to them, but as an equal, a partner," Ivakhnik said.
Many have compared Roizman to Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner and street protest leader who was allowed to run for mayor of Moscow and stunned everyone by earning 27% of the vote on Sunday. Both men started their political careers as grassroots activists − Navalny against corruption and Roizman against drugs − and both have undeniable charisma and a straight-talking, folksy charm.
But whereas Navalny has for years fought against the regime, famously dubbing Vladimir Putin a "toad on an oil pipe," Roizman hasn't spoken out against Putin, confining his criticism mostly to regional issues. Most of his conflicts have been highly personal: during a radio debate while running for the regional Duma in 2006, he got into a fistfight with his opponent, while his conflict with United Russia governor Kuivashev came after Roizman's girlfriend and campaign manager, Aksana Panova, spurned the governor's advances, she told the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Panova is on trial for blackmail, and Roizman has been under investigation for alleged mafia ties and theft of religious icons in what many regard as political pressure on them.
Roizman left home at 14 and served prison time in his early 20s for theft, fraud and arms possession, although his sentence was later overturned. He worked assembling heavy machinery at the local Uralmash plant and then went into business, starting a successful jewellery company. He has since been able to indulge his many interests, including "trophy ride" off-road racing and collecting Old Believer icons (he owns a museum and restoration school).
In 1999, he co-founded the City Without Drugs foundation to combat Yekaterinburg's rising heroin use. The foundation's strict treatment methods have provoked controversy, and the director of one of its centres is on trial for holding patients by force after one drug addict died there.
Nonetheless, Yekaterinburg residents often come to his office seeking help with their problems. Television host and opposition activist Ksenia Sobchak compared him to Batman for his reputation of fighting evildoers and called him a "strong Russian guy" in reference to his brawny physique and homespun charm.
As mayor his main responsibility is to preside over the city Duma, where United Russia has a majority, while the city manager handles the budget and many administrative tasks (Roizman was put forward by Civic Platform, a celebrity-filled party run by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov that is not part of the system of Kremlin loyalist parties). But Roizman's black-and-white worldview, his aversion to party politics and his lack of a concrete political platform will make it difficult for him to assemble a team and achieve reforms, said Yevgeny Artyukh, a regional legislator from the Pensioners' Party who knows Roizman from when they were both members of A Just Russia.
